Part I
How Humor Contributes to Physical Health: General Influences
The mere fact that you feel better after a good laugh is enough for many to conclude that humor must be good for you. But new evidence confirms what our grandparents knew all along. Your sense of humor not only enriches life; it also promotes physical, mental and spiritual health.
Muscle Relaxation
Stress management has become a multi-million dollar business in the United States and is rapidly growing in other countries. The Japanese, for example, are well acquainted with the harmful effects of stress. They have created a new word, karoshi, which means "death from overwork."
Many stress management techniques have been developed, including physical exercise, progressive relaxation, biofeedback, deep breathing, meditation, massage, etc. The goal of these techniques is to produce muscle relaxation and the easing of psychological tensions that goes with it. You don't have to spend tremendous amounts of time, effort and money learning special relaxation techniques. You just have to find more humor in your life - and laugh more! Belly laughter produces relaxation automatically and naturally.2 And genuinely mirthful laughter (i.e., laughter associated with the experience of humor) appears to trigger a stronger muscle relaxation effect than laughter without mirth.3
This relaxation effect is easily noticeable when you have a good laugh. In my keynote addresses, I do a laughter exercise in which I get everyone in the room doing belly laughter for half a minute. Afterwards, I ask them what changes they notice in their bodies. The first comment is usually, "I feel a lot more relaxed." The next time you have a good long laugh, look for this feeling of relaxation and reduced tension.
Two separate mechanisms cause the relaxation you notice. Muscles not directly participating in the act of laughter tend to relax while you're laughing. That's why little kids fall down during fits of laughter. It's also why you seem to lose your strength when you're laughing (just try carrying a friend - or any other heavy object - across the room when you're laughing hard). When you stop laughing, the muscles that had been contracting relax. This is no different from what happens with any other physical activity. When you stop working muscles, their natural tendency is to relax. In combination, these two mechanisms produce a general pattern of muscle relaxation throughout your body.
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One study showed that people using a biofeedback apparatus were able to relax muscles more quickly after watching funny cartoons than after looking at beautiful scenery.4 The importance of this natural relaxation effect may be seen in the fact that relaxation not only helps reduce stress; it also helps alleviate heart disease,5 headaches,6 chronic anxiety,7 and other problems. For patients with rheumatism, neuralgia, or other conditions characterized by a spasm-pain-spasm cycle, the reduced muscle tension that results from laughter disrupts this cycle and reduces the pain experienced.
This muscle relaxation effect has its practical side in hospitals. Some nurses tell patients jokes before giving them shots, because they know it keeps them from tightening up their muscles in anticipation of the shot.
Reduction of Stress Hormones
When you're under stress, your body undergoes a series of hormonal and other body changes which make up the "fight or flight" response. Even though there's no physical threat to your life, your body reacts as if there were. The health risk comes when cortisol and other stress hormones continue to circulate throughout our bodies day after day.8 For example, heightened cortisol levels contribute to inflammatory diseases.9 Anything which reduces the level of stress hormones in the blood on a regular basis helps reduce this health threat. Anything which reduces the level of stress hormones in the blood on a regular basis helps reduce this health threat.
The limited research on stress-related hormones and humor has shown that laughter reduces at least four neuroendocrine hormones associated with the stress response, including epinephrine, cortisol, dopac, and growth hormone.10 This is consistent with research showing that various relaxation procedures reduce stress hormones.11
